In the NHS it's not enough any more to give people a take-it-or-leave-it service. People must feel the service is personal to their needs, and they are not treated as a number or as a statistic.

The one-to-one personal care and treatment that people might expect only to get in the private sector by paying large sums of money, they should be able to get in the NHS.

We are proposing that every person who suffers from cancer will, over the next parliament, get the personal care of a professional nurse. So if you are diagnosed as having cancer, you will have this one-to-one professional nursing treatment available to you.

So, instead of arriving at a hospital and hoping to see the nurse or the doctor you had before, that nurse will stay with you. And that nurse would be able to help you at home as well as when you arrive at the hospital.

This one-to-one care is how we plan to develop lots of other services in future. If you take cancer, if you suffer from breast or bowel cancer, because of screening, and because of early diagnosis, two things that are now widely available as a result of the changes we've made, the estimate is you have a 90%-plus chance of surviving cancer.

What we are going to do in the next parliament is [introduce] a two-week guarantee that you will see a specialist. So if you go to your GP, you see a specialist within two weeks.

It will also become a guarantee that you will have all the diagnostic tests within two weeks.

Then we want to move to one week, which would mean that for most people, they would be able under these new arrangements to get the results back on the same day, which hasn't been something that has happened in the past.

Now the way I see this is as a transformation: we move from dealing with the under-investment of our public services to having targets which are an essential means of making delivery happen. And we move now from targets to personal guarantees.

So if you are a patient of the National Health Service, you will know that you will get your operation within 18 weeks, or you've got a form of redress, including access to private care that the health service would have to pay for. You will be able to get a check-up, because we're going to introduce that during the next parliament, now available only in the private sector to pay for, but free of charge under the health service.

We will make sure that there is a GP available at weekends or in the evenings in your area; and at the same time, [introduce] the cancer guarantee.

Is that part of a wider initiative to look at doing the same thing for other long-term conditions?

Yes, and we've introduced individual budgets so people not only have a guarantee of service, but they actually run their own budgets. And for chronic illnesses, we have to do more.

The health service is in the end about giving people an assurance that it's there for you when you need it. It is a benefit not just to people on modest and low incomes, it's a benefit to middle-class families.

I come from a middle-class family, but I know that because the cost of treatments is so big for some of the illnesses that people have that there's no family, except someone who's really, really wealthy, that could afford the kind of treatments that sometimes are needed and, therefore, it makes sense to pool your resources to do so.